ISIS leader Baghdadi remains a man of mystery

He is regarded as one of the most powerful militants in the world, a former Islamist preacher who evolved into a global jihadist now threatening to rewrite the map of the Middle East.

He is regarded as one of the most powerful militants in the world, a former Islamist preacher who evolved into a global jihadist now threatening to rewrite the map of the Middle East.

Yet Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, the head of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, remains largely a mystery, even to his followers.

Unlike such iconic figures as al-Qaida leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri, only two photos are known to exist of Baghdadi, showing a trim-bearded man with thick eyebrows. Baghdadi, whose fighters have seized large swaths of territory in both Syria and Iraq, only releases audio messages. Even when he meets with ISIS commanders, Baghdadi is said not to reveal himself.

During such sessions, several men whose faces are covered to conceal their identities are said to enter the room, listening without speaking and then leaving. The commanders are simply told that "one of these was Baghadadi and he heard what you wanted and he will respond at a later time," said Abu Ibrahim Al Raqqawi, an opposition activist in Raqqa, Syria where ISIS has established what it views as the capital of a burgeoning trans-national Islamist caliphate.

"No one deals with him except leaders at the highest level," said Raqqawi.

The emergence of ISIS illustrates the growing importance of regional militant groups, several of which have now eclipsed al-Qaida’s central command, which has been battered by U.S. drone strikes and other attacks aimed at its strongholds in Pakistan.

U.S. officials long have expressed worries about a group based in Yemen, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and growing concern about the Qaida in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb based in Algeria and Mali. The rising prominence of such regional groups, including the al-Qaida branches, has corresponded in part with internal criticism of Zawahiri as an inadequate successor to Osama bin Laden.

Baghdadi’s fighters have made brutality their calling card, executing detainees in public squares and even crucifying some victims. The current fighting brings him back to familiar turf. His path was shaped by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and included time in a U.S.-run prison.

Born in Samarra, Iraq, in 1971, Baghdadi holds a doctorate in Islamic studies from the Islamic University in Baghdad and worked as a teacher and Sunni Muslim preacher before the invasion that toppled the Sunni-dominated government of Saddam Hussein, according to an unofficial biography that has circulated on jihadist web sites.

The name Baghdadi — his full name is Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali Al Badri Al Samarri — signifies his ties to the Iraqi capital. Baghdadi first fought the Americans and then the emerging Shiite-run Iraqi government as a member of the Mujahadeen Army, an Islamist force with nationalistic rather than global ambitions.

"He wasn’t this globalist jihadist going to Afghanistan, but he was recruited during the Iraq war," said Aron Lund, an academic who has written for the Carnegie Endowment’s Syria in Crisis web site. "The war essentially came to him."

Baghdadi is believed to have served time in the U.S.-run prison Camp Bucca during the war — and it was there, jihadists sources say, that he joined a nascent Iraqi branch of al-Qaida known as al-Qaida in Iraq founded by Abu Musab Zarqawi, who was killed in a 2006 U.S. air strike. Zarqawi led a bloody campaign of suicide bombings, kidnappings and hostage beheadings against Shiites and Americans.

In 2010, when another ISI leader was slain, Baghdadi was elected its leader.

ISIS was itself affiliated with al-Qaida until Baghdadi rebranded the franchise and went international by entering the fray in neighboring Syria in April 2013. Introduction of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria was made in customary Baghdadi fashion: a 23-minute video consisting of the group’s black and white flag flapping over a strictly audio statement.

Al-Qaida chief Zawahiri unsuccessfully ordered ISIS to cease operations and return to Iraq. But Baghdadi refused and after this somewhat inauspicious beginning, ISIS forces violently seized control of large swaths of northern Syria.

While its leader remains secretive, ISIS has used social media outlets such Twitter and YouTube to recruit seasoned and first-time Sunni fighters from across the world, including North Africans, Europeans and a large group of Chechens. These fighters have been lured by recruitment videos portraying Syria as a showdown between Sunnis on one side and Shiites and Alawites on the other.

In Syria, ISIS is at odds with most other opposition groups, including militant Islamists from the Nusra Front, as well as the government of President Bashar Assad.

In a January audio message after weeks of deadly clashes between ISIS and other rebels, Baghdadi tried to calm the tensions. He issued an audio message urging his fighters to cease battling rebels who laid down their weapons "and forgive and reconcile so you fight a depraved enemy (Assad)."

Yet if anything, ISIS has managed to consolidate its territorial holdings in northeast Syria near the border with Iraq. And as it seizes sizeable cities in Iraq including Mosul and Tikrit, the hometown of Hussein, the border between the two nations has become somewhat of a fiction.